


Dream Big

by ivyspinners



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 12:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3692484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whatever she likes to pretend, Murphy never stops listening for the announcement that a spaceship has come back into view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Big

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



> For kwritten's prompt [here](http://fluffyfrolicker.livejournal.com/60851.html?thread=2180019#t2180019).

Whatever she likes to pretend, Murphy never stops listening for the announcement that a spaceship has come back into view.

She imagines it, sometimes, in her weakest moments: a shout in the control room, a buzzing voice across the intercoms that reaches every corner of the facility, and wherever she was squirreled away, she would just _know_. That's always been her weakness, dreaming big, so big it was terrifying because she had known it was the truth. Could be the truth, anyway, if her Dad had anything to say about it. Dreams of what really _could_ be are always the hardest to give up.

Tom, she knows, sends a signal into the unknown, year after year after year. It isn't always on the same date, and the room migrated all around the base, but more years than not, she waits outside the door 'till he walks out. They go for coffee, then water, then some kind of dust-resistant beverage, as the Blight swallows cornfields whole. Tom invites her back to the farm, half-heartedly. Murph usually doesn't accept.

They are like clockwork, the two children left behind, Tom taping a message with fluctuating levels of hope, Murph clinging to hope, to _Dad's gotta come back_ , without making a move to enter that room. Tom returning to toil fruitlessly on the dying land, Murph to more work on that equation.

Tom going back to his family, Murph to the sterile matrix of numbers that don't quite make sense. The things they do for love.

 

It's not that Murphy doesn't have friends. She does. She has twenty-something colleagues working in fields that intersect with hers, people who spend hours staring into telescopes and making precise measurements, jotting down information that eventually feed into Professor Brand's unruly child of an equation. They sit together for dinner and make jokes other workers don't always understand, but unfailingly roll their eyes at.

They're something of a community, really.

But there's no one she sees day in and day out, outside of her work. No one she meets regularly for meals; few leisure activities, at all. It's not that Murphy avoids it, the way she avoids her bedroom in the farmhouse, simply that there other things to ponder with her time.

Her Dad's gone into outer space. However Murphy feels about that, now, she has a duty, as the dreamer who was left behind, and that duty is in the facility.

 

But life is immediate; it cannot be put off, cannot really be left on the wayside.

Tom stops sending out transmissions, not long after Murph realizes just how old she is. Older than Dad--now that's a thought. She grew up a long time ago, has known her direction and purpose for longer still, and yet:

Her nephew coughs like he's on the verge of choking, like there's something in his lungs, and Murphy doesn't know anything about that but she can't just leave him. There are no numbers to express this.

 _Dad didn't raise me at all_ , Tom says, in a fit of anger, and it's rather terrible that it takes Tom for her to remember.

Murph wasn't raised by Dad either, but by his shadow, his legacy, and there is a difference. All these years, she has been clinging to a ghost; thinking of the possibility isn't the same as giving up on hope. The numbers mean more, but so does her nephew--and out there, there's _more_.

She had forgotten.

The moment she realizes that is the moment she's brave enough to walk into that bedroom again. Outside, Tom's cornfields are going up in flames--

And Murphy picks up that watch.

 

Tom's family settle well enough, in the NASA base. Most of Murphy's time is spent decoding the signals of that watch. Another woman might have questioned this, thought it beyond the realm of possibility, but Murphy's always thought big, and impossible's not in her vocabulary. Whatever can happen, will happen, so why not believe in miracles?

 

The day she solves the equation is the day that space collapses around her, completely. She rushes through the station, exhilarated beyond words. Just for luck, she kisses Getty. Because she's alive, and so is he, and maybe Dad is or isn't, somewhere out there. Murphy thinks he is, but either way, she's definitely going to live.

There are numbers in her hands that make sense. Dream and reality have intersected. The rest of the world's gonna live too.

fin


End file.
